LINGUIST List 21.3570
Wed Sep 08 2010
Diss: Disc Analysis/Pragmatics: Buysse: 'Discourse Marker So in ...'
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1. Lieven
Buysse,
Discourse Marker So in Native and Non-Native Spoken English
Message 1: Discourse Marker So in Native and Non-Native Spoken English
Date: 08-Sep-2010
From: Lieven Buysse <lieven.buyssehubrussel.be>
Subject: Discourse Marker So in Native and Non-Native Spoken English
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Institution: Ghent University
Program: Germanic languages
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2010
Author: Lieven Buysse
Dissertation Title: Discourse Marker So in Native and Non-Native Spoken English
Linguistic Field(s):
Discourse Analysis
Pragmatics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
Dissertation Abstract:
In foreign language learning grammar and vocabulary typically take centrestage, leaving only a marginal position, if any at all, for pragmaticfeatures. Learners thus appear to be expected to learn a language withlittle attention to context and the array of social actions they canperform with the target language. Among these pragmatic features arediscourse markers, i.e. small words like 'so', 'well', 'you know' and 'Imean' that do not contribute much to the propositional content of a messagebut modify it in various subtle ways. These have been studied extensivelyin native speaker discourse over the past few decades, but their use innon-native spoken language has only recently started to attract someattention.
This doctoral dissertation gauges the extent to which these pragmaticfeatures, and the discourse marker 'so' in particular, are used (and mayhence be assumed to have been acquired) by Belgian native speakers of Dutchwho have almost reached the end of formal instruction in English. To thisend a corpus of English-spoken interviews has been compiled with learnersof English that exhibit distinct learner profiles. Half of the intervieweesare undergraduates majoring in English Linguistics, and the other half areundergraduates majoring in Commercial Sciences. Not only is the use ofdiscourse markers in these two sub-corpora juxtaposed from a quantitativeand a qualitative perspective, the learner corpus is also set off against acomparable native speaker corpus, drawn from LOCNEC (the native speakerreference corpus of the LINDSEI project, hosted at the UCLouvain).
The investigation has shown that the language learners exhibit a clearpreference for some English markers, notably those with a more structuralfunction (so, well), and neglect others, notably those with a moreinterpersonal function (you know, I mean, sort of, etc). The differencesbetween the two learner sub-corpora are often subtle, but in general thereis a tendency for the students of English Linguistics to use these markersmore frequently than the students of Commercial Sciences, and to a richerextent.
'So' is the most frequent discourse marker in all three sub-corpora, andall interviewees use 'so' as such. 1,258 tokens of 'so' have beenidentified as fulfilling a discourse marker function in the corpus,amounting to some 80 per cent of all attested tokens of the item. These canbe classified into ten categories, and can be recognised as expressing arelationship that is either ideational, interpersonal or textual. It isargued that these ten functions are polysemously related to each other andto a 'resultative' core. The relative distance of these functions to oneanother is determined by the intensity with which the following threecharacteristics are (saliently) present in each function: a 'result'meaning, a hypertactic shift and a sense of closure.
Discourse marker 'so' is significantly more frequent in the learnersub-corpora than in the native sub-corpus, and the students of EnglishLinguistics use 'so' slightly more often than their peers who studyCommercial Sciences.
The dissertation provides tentative explanations for these findings andsuggests avenues for further research. Its results have importantimplications for the study of the discourse marker 'so' as well as forresearch on the acquisition of pragmatic devices by foreign languagelearners and the development of approaches to the teaching of pragmatics inthe foreign language classroom.
Page Updated: 08-Sep-2010
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